PHILIPPINES
Asian Sentinel
Written by John Berthelsen
TUESDAY, 13 AUGUST 2013
A devastating look at sex, politics and money in the Philippine Catholic Church by Aries C. Rufo. Published by the Journalism for Nation Building Foundation, Pasig City, Philippines. Soft cover, 309 pp. Available at bookstores in the Philippines
Aries C. Rufo, a prize-winning Filipino journalist, was once a devout Catholic who as a youth “loved staying inside the church for it offered refuge from the punishing heat outside. The airy atmosphere and the deafening silence were pure ecstasy,” he writes. As a boy he seriously contemplated entering the seminary although the desire to do so eventually waned.
After decades as a journalist, some of it spent covering the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines (CBCP)?, he sat down to write this book, Altar of Secrets: Sex, Politics and Money in the Philippine Catholic Church.
“While the Church dips its fingers into every aspect of Filipino life,” he writes, “it has resisted outside attempts to poke into its internal affairs. Like a cloistered monastery, it has kept from the public the scandals and irregularities of its members, within its sacrosanct walls.”
With Catholics making up 86 percent of the Philippine population and with the Council of Bishops holding inordinate sway over the country’s leaders, the church seemed almost unassailable. But Rufo’s journey through the secrets of the Catholic Church of the Philippines finds an institution in grave disarray. The Council’s last-ditch attempt to stop passage of the landmark Reproductive Health Bill failed and the subsequent attempt earlier this year to drive lawmakers from office for voting for the measure was also a miserable failure. Earlier this year a survey by the church found that more than half of Filipino Catholics have not married under Catholic rites.
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